Wringing an Emotional Sponge

Something I’ve known for a long time, but failed to really think too much about I guess, hit me square upside the head a little while ago while I was sitting and perusing my rather large stash of video games and movies.  Nothing exactly landmark to anyone who knows me, but it just seemed important at that moment…

There is a specific reason that I believe I’m drawn to certain movies, songs, games, tv shows, and animes.  I keep going back to the best of them for this one thing, but it’s never quite like the first time ever again.  I want to have emotion wrung from me.  I want a story to make me feel something strong.  And I think it’s because I feel very little otherwise.  The most recent example is plowing my way through the anime His and Her Circumstances.  The first 10-13 episodes had me completely enraptured.  The series is about the relationship between two students, Yukino Miyazawa and Souichiro Arima.  They’re both believed to be model students:  good grades, good at sports, popular, helpful…the whole nine.  When they first meet, they’re hostile because Yuki is jealous of Arima’s status as the class’s number one student.  Graudally, they begin to secretly like each other.  Finally, they vow to work together to strip away the masks they wear publicly to reveal their true selves…eventually landing them together as a loving couple, living only for each other.  It’s an incredibly beautiful love story, told through both their perspectives.  You learn each characters insecurities and dark sides.  But you learn to feel for them…root for them.  Then the series starts to digress into Yuki’s search for friends, a few summary episodes, and a few side stories.  By the time episode 26 (the final one) rolls around, they’ve built up a great subplot of Arima being jealous of how much attention Yukino is getting from other males.  And they go almost nowhere with it.  The final episode is more about the revenge plot of another student against one of Yuki’s friends than Arima’s jealousy.  That’s resolved in a short scene where Yukino runs up behind Arima, hugs him, and says she wants to be with him forever.  I guess it does fully resolve it…but it’s just too easy for all the build up.  But, back to my point, the first half or so of the series just wrings all the emotion out of you that you can spare, and then some.

It’s the reason I keep going back to movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Chasing Amy, and Ying Xiong.  These movies hit me every single time I watch them…but never the way they did the first time I saw ’em (except for in Chasing Amy‘s case…that one hit me the second time, as the first time I saw it was a few years before, and I didn’t care for it).  Magnolia is another prime example.  I’ve always referred to it as the most emotionally draining movie ever.  Every single time I watch it, I feel like I’ve run a marathon or something.  It just drains that much out of me.

Games get me the same way.  They may not have the pure emotional wringer (which is hard to pull off in a 40+ hour game when compared to a two hour movie or even a 26 episode anime series) that other visual mediums can pull off, but the best of them have incredibly compelling characters…characters you feel for and want to follow the adventures of until the end.  When the story is slower, the characters themselves have to be the driving force behind getting people to keep going.  My favorite example of this is Tales of Symphonia.  The story of this game has tons of twists and turns, but can be slow at times.  The characters, though, are very defined.  They are allowed their own individual personalities, and are allowed to change.  Each of them has a rather lengthy backstory that you’re allowed to explor, which allows you a greater insight into their motivations and emotions.  And all the twists and turns just wrings it out of you.  It’s kind of the video game equivalent of a page turner.  Star Ocean:  Till the End of Time is the same way.  And the lack of emotional storyline and merely one dimensional characters is probably a big reason why I’m having trouble trying to get through playing Dragon Quest VIII.  But anyway…

So, basically, I think I go to these things to make myself feel something…anything.  Because there isn’t really anything for me to feel about in the rest of my life right now.  And I guess it’s best to have at least something that can make a person feel, even if it isn’t something rooted completely in reality.  Maybe I used to feel too many things in life and needed a break from that.  Or maybe it was always a way of sapping the rest of the emotion outta me.

Now Playing in Dave’s Mental Jukebox:  "So Cold" (Acoustic Version) by Breaking Benjamin, "Down" by Drain STH, and "Wise Up" by Aimee Mann

And with that Amtrak of Thought in the book….I go.

Sayonara.